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For those of you following my exploits with the instrument of torture that is my home laptop, you will be happy to know it's been solved. Here's the long and the short of it. After re-installing Vista on the beast and routinely waiting up to 20 minutes for it to load and experiencing up to 23 crashes in an evening I found the solution. 

Let me backtrack.

It all started one bright, shiny, happy day when a nice FedEx man who didn't mind my lurking in the hallway (that much) delivered my shiny new Mac. They say the iPhone is the gateway drug: and it's certainly true in my case. I will never go back to a PC. You can't make me. 

So the Mac-ifying of my life continued on in a rocketing snowball fashion. It soon rolled right over my Dell Mini 9 (That started when I sorta locked it by letting Linux background install too many apps...100% of mini's mini 4GB hard drive used up. oops. my bad. Purchased a 32GB replacement and solved the mini's biggest limitation. If you're looking for a replacement hard drive for your mini consider www.conics.net in Japan. Offer good selection, good price, amazing delivery.). 

Once all was said and done, my new world order made me look at my instrument of torture in a new light. Whereas it had seemed slow before...well, now compared to the speedy Mac it operated at a painful crawl. Action was immediate.

No, I didn't take a sledgehammer to it. Number one reason being that a fire a few years back a fire at my cottage resulted in the firemen taking the sledgehammer (a small price to pay for salvaging the ruins of my home I think). Number two reason being that the perfect solution to my wiki woes (side story here: I snapped up a five-user Confluence license when they went on sale awhile back...but sadly the server I was using for my brother's website can't handle the install...needs more juice) is setting up my own home server. I had hoped to steal the kid's computer. But he resisted. Something about college, homework, etc., I have to say it all seemed really trivial to me, but he wouldn't let me take it. How rude.

So my greedy eyes next lit upon the instrument of torture. A-ha! It had once held Linux quite happily. Could it, would it be the perfect solution? 

Well...it took me all of five second to make that decision (once I recalled that the sledgehammer was gone). Vista: no more. And good riddance. As one of my past installs on the instrument of torture was Ubuntu, I decided to go with the Ubuntu Server on it (Jaunty for those who care). Biggest blip in the half hour it all took to configure was setting it up with a static IP. And that took about two minutes. 

Tonight I'll be installing Confluence and setting up my wiki once more. Yippee! 

Yes, I know this is not Flex. And it is not that Flex is dead to me. It's just that playing in the world of shells and wikis is a lot of fun and very very distracting. Some day, once my wiki woes are long forgotten I'll return. 

I'll keep you updated on the Confluence install and I'm also toying with adding Melody for my brother's website (currently on Movable Type). 

[Note that Ubuntu now has a netbook remix...interesting.]

I've been quiet for a bit (except for twitter), the day job has been getting in the way of the day job (that makes sense to me). Though I may be quiet on this front, I am not generally a quiet person at the day job. For example, last week I inadvertently (ha! right!) started "the browser wars" here at work with the tech group. 

It all started with our blogs not displaying correctly in IE8. I happened to respond that it struck me as interesting that our blogs display correctly in Chrome, Safari (for XP no less), and Firefox...but not IE. Begging the question, what is everybody doing right? (Okay, I actually said, what is Microsoft doing wrong.....). 

This prompted a response pointing to browser stats, and a raging discussion on the merits of IE versus the others...browser wars. Someone even suggested that the other browsers were (egads) fads. I'm sure many of you know what I'm talking about...you've had these wars...possibly lost friends to them..... 

So this got me thinking. I had a pretty good idea of our own stats for our website, but what about our blogs? Did they both match the browser stats above? I couldn't resist and here's the results:

Onestats (I picked worldwide because I picked worldwide on our stats too):

Worldwide	March 2009
Internet Explorer	79.79%
Mozilla Firefox	15.59%
Apple Safari	2.65%
Google Chrome	0.86%
Opera	0.54%
Netscape	0.31%

Our Website:

www.4Point.com	March 2009
Internet Explorer	69.09%
Mozilla Firefox	24.67%
Apple Safari	3.96%
Google Chrome	3.67%
Opera	1.07%
Netscape	0%

Our Blogs:

blogs.4point.com	March 2009
Mozilla Firefox	56.16%
Internet Explorer	33.65%
Google Chrome	4.76%
Apple Safari	3.27%
Opera	1.56%
Netscape	0%

Yes, you've read it right. Firefox wins when it comes to our blogs. I'm sure others have seen this trend on certain types of websites as well (and note that Chrome beats out Safari). My analysis: Our blogs are techie, techies visit them, techies are more open to new technology...hence the whopping change in browser usage. 

Which is of course why we had the argument last week...techies care about this stuff. I can bet that the average household isn't having neighborhood arguments with signs on their front lawns declaring browser affinity...but maybe they should. It's gotta be good to criticize technology (that's another longer discussion, but check out this article by John Siracusa on arstechnica.com as a starting point).

I think we'll see more and more change in browsers as more generations rise up that our Internet savvy (and Apple consuming). 

And before I launch another battle right here and now, let it be known that I think all the browsers have flaws...which is why I have Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and IE on my desktop and interchange them depending on the site and situation. Ridiculous, I know. But until one of them manages to do it all right....it's the world I live in. 

Hence, I predict that we'll actually see more and more a flattening of the numbers as more people start to shift and split their browser usage depending on what they're doing. Currently, I predominantly use Chrome at work (Firefox and me don't get along, though I used to love it, due to a memory glut issue that kept crashing my work) and Safari at home (on Vista no less). On my Linux OS (my Dell Mini 9) I use Firefox. 

So now I leave it there. Share with me your own browser war stories or your own stats. I'm intrigued. 

Because, let's be honest. It's no fad. And yes, thems fighting words. 

UPDATE (June 18, 2009)
Just read another notice about how Google Chrome is rising fast. We'll see if it can hold on past being a 'fad'. Check out this article: Chrome Market Share

I went to MT's site for support on this one. And I found the title, got all excited. Clicked on it. And the page was blank. Not Kidding. Check it out. So. Here's what I finally figured out and did (again as a support to the world...I'm learning Flex, but I also spend my days handling SEO, so you're getting it all). 

All right. I know this is not Flex. But I did mention I get sidetracked. And since I couldn't easily find this in a search...I thought it may be useful to people. What I did find was some code for adding Twitter to TypePad off the Twitter site. Figured I'd modify it a bit and create an MT widget and see if it works. It does. So here you go!